Eight Ball
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth sits in a bar and reflects on life, love and Afghanistan in the wake of his reunion with Brennan at the beginning of episode 6x1, "Mastodon in the Room."


**Eight Ball**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those delicious little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, tiny little fill-ins of scenes that might've happened but we never saw, but which offer a bit of insight into what our heroes were thinking. That's why you read fanfic.

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**A/N: **_I've become a big baseball fan in recent years, and since moving to Florida, I've given my loyalty to central Florida's own boys of summer, the Tampa Bay Rays. A loyal reader, fellow writer, Boothlover and friend of mine, _**broilthesuspect**_, is a huge—dare I say fanatical—fan of the Baltimore Orioles, a rival of the the Rays in the American League East. So, naturally, being the cocky monkey that I am, I offered her a wager concerning the relative AL East rankings of our teams at the end of the 2012 season, with the prize being a fanfic written by the loser in response to the prompt of the winner's choice. For a while, it was close running, but in the end, my Rays choked and her Orioles finished ahead of them in the AL East. I lost the bet and Broil won. So, Broil, here's your wild-card winning fic. I hope you enjoy it._

**Logistical note: **_This story is set at the beginning of episode 6x1 ("Mastodon in the Room") immediately after the meeting at the Hoover but before Booth, Brennan and the reunited squints begin their investigation into the disappearance of Logan Bartlett. _

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I leaned over the edge of the pool table, the shirtsleeves of my Army Combat Uniform rolled midway up my forearms as I stroked the cue over the web between my thumb and forefinger. Narrowing my eyes a little, I let out a small breath as I lined up the shot, then snapped the cue forward, sending the balls fanning out across the felt and sinking two of them off the break.

I stood up and shook out my arms.

I felt rusty. It'd been awhile since I shot pool. A very long while, in fact_—_not since the night I spent here, at this very same dive bar, shooting pool until the small hours of the morning when I got the call from Gemma Arrington's mom about the New York coroner releasing her remains for burial. Not since that very first case, five years ago, had I picked up a cue and laid money on the edge of the table.

"Nice break," my opponent said.

I looked up from my daze and blinked. "Yeah," I replied vaguely. "Thanks." I walked around the side of the table and saw the pair of crumpled twenty dollar bills laying on the burnished edge, halfway between the diamond-shaped sights inlaid into the table's rail. I took a deep breath and leaned over again, lined up another shot, and with a snap of my wrist, knocked the one-ball into a side pocket and buried the six-ball into the corner with a nice banking shot. I felt a twitchy, nervous energy in my limbs as I began to get a little excited. Maybe I hadn't lost my touch after all.

"You on leave?" my opponent asked me as I walked my way around for another shot. He was a young guy, maybe mid-twenties, in a black The Who T-shirt and dark jeans with the faded fake whiskers on the thighs.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. "Just got back," I grunted in reply, then quickly lined up another shot, aimed to drop the seven-ball with a bank shot and snapped the cue. The cue-ball shot across the felt but hit the target slightly off-center, causing me to miss the shot. "Fuck," I muttered under my breath, glancing out of the corner of my eye at the twenty bucks I was about to lose as my opponent stalked around the edge of the table like a panther after its prey.

"Iraq?" he asked curtly as he drew his cue back and readied his own shot. He was going to try and drop the twelve-ball with a glancing shot, hitting my four-ball away from the edge of the corner pocket where it presently sat and in so doing, sending his target ball into the other corner pocket. He snapped his cue back and took his shot with a crisp stroke, and he blocked my next shot with a satisfying _clack _as his target ball dropped into the corner pocket. I was officially fucked.

"No," I sighed. Two minutes into my first game in five years and I was screwed. Twenty bucks gone. "Afghanistan," I told him.

"_So was it dangerous in Afghanistan?" Bones had asked me as we were sitting there on the steps looking at the Capitol and the Washington Monument in the distance._

"_Nah," I replied with quick shake of my head. _

_I felt a flash of something, a wave of darkness, wash over me as I looked at the photo in Bones' hand and thought about the three men I was standing with. Two of them—Safar and Tahib—were dead, killed a week before I left. Taliban insurgents set off a car bomb in a bazaar for the express purpose of drawing my Afghan National Army men and me into an ambush, knowing we'd rush into the bazaar to secure the area and treat the wounded. _

_What was I supposed to tell her? That I trained squads of specially-picked Afghan soldiers in small arms, urban warfare and counterinsurgency tactics so I could turn them into hunter-killer teams? That I spent a month at a classified compound in the mountains of Helmand Province as the lead instructor giving a condensed version of the U.S. Army Sniper School course so that Afghan farmers could learn to kill a man at five hundred meters using weapons we gave 'em knowing that there was more or less even odds that they'd turn around and at some point use it against us? I didn't want to go there, and I didn't want to take her there with me. I swallowed and blinked away the memory, then said, "What I did was mostly administrative." _

_Bones arched her eyebrow a bit at that comment. "Because you seem really very heavily armed in this photograph," she said with a faint smile as she handed me the photograph back. I took it back and reached around to stuff it into the thigh pocket of my ACUs, then quickly changed the subject._

"_How about you?" I asked her with a grin. "Any headhunters or cannibals?" I knew she hated it when I stereotyped like that, but I wanted to needle her a little. It had been too long, you know._

"_Daisy and I were attacked by some armed guerillas," she said brightly. "But I...I beat them up and we got away."_

_I raised my eyebrows, unashamedly impressed. "You beat up armed guerrillas?" I asked, more or less rhetorically. For one thing, Bones didn't lie, and besides, my partner kicked ass. I'd seen her do it before and I loved that about her. Guerrillas with AK-47's? Psssh. 'Whatever,' I can see her thinking. 'Come over here for your well-deserved Temperance Brennan ass-whippin'. That's why I'd let her have my back any damn day and twice on Sunday. _

"_I had to," she said, her voice suddenly lowering and softening. "You weren't there to save me."_

_I laughed a little at that even as I felt a warm feeling ooze through my chest. I couldn't suppress a smile. "Oh, Bones," I said, nudging her with my elbow. She had an odd look on her face that I couldn't quite decipher. After a few seconds of awkward silence, I swallowed again and said, "Uh, so, did you meet anyone special?"_

_She gave me a crooked grin. "You mean did I have sex with anyone?"_

_Jeez, Bones, I thought. "I missed that about you," I said wryly. "You know, you just cut right to the chase." _

"_I was working," she replied flatly. "So there was no time or inclination for sex...or romance." She paused for a moment and our eyes met, each of us holding the other's gaze for a moment before she smiled faintly and asked, "You?"_

"Another game?" the kid asked me as he swiped the two twenties off the edge of the pool table after our second game.

"No, uhhh," I stammered. Jerking my chin in the direction of the bar, I said, "I'm gonna sit this one out. Thanks, though." Why was I thanking this little punk for taking my money? A voice in the back of my head mutttered at me that I couldn't do this. _Walk away, _it said.

"No problem, buddy," he said with a flash of his eyebrows as he stuffed my money into the pocket of his trendy jeans.

I didn't reply, but walked over to the bar and took a seat. The bartender was the same old Italian guy who'd been working there for years. He gave me a quick glance then pulled the tap handle down as he poured a beer for another patron, then swiveled his head around for another double-take as he recognized me. He topped off the Bud Light he'd just poured, handed it across the bar to the guy who'd ordered it, then flipped his towel over his shoulder and walked over to me.

"It's been a while," he said as he reached his hand over the bar to shake mine. With a slight jerk of his chin, he gestured towards the grey, green and beige digital camouflage of my uniform and said, "I thought you were a cop. So, you got yourself called up, huh?"

I felt a wave of nausea flash in my gut. "No," I said. "I enlisted."

He blinked at my answer, clearly not expecting that. After a second, he recovered and said, "Well, uh, good to see ya again. What can I get for ya?"

I looked at my watch. It was one. I knew I should go home, but I was too wired to sleep and too tired to do anything else. I had a knot in my gut and my head was spinning, and I figured maybe a drink would help. It couldn't hurt. Two days ago I thought I had everything in my life totally squared away, at least as much as could be expected considering how royally I'd fucked it up ten months ago.

_"Just give it a chance," I begged her with a cracking voice. "That's all I'm asking."_

_"No," she insisted. Her voice was uneven and I could see tears had started to fall from her eyes. "You said it yourself; the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome."_

_"Well, then let's go for a different outcome here, alright?" I was pleading with her. I held her upper arms in my hands, gently but firmly enough that the pads of my fingertips dug into her. I could feel her stiffen in my grasp. I swallowed hard as tears welled up in my own eyes. "Let's just—hear me out, alright? You know when you talk to older couples who, you know, have been in love for thirty or forty or fifty years, alright, it's always the guy who says 'I knew.'"_

I sighed.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I woke up on a skimpy bunk in a temporary barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, after making the long trip up from Qūryah by Humvee and helicopter the prior day. But everything was going to be okay. I was heading home, out of the goddamned, fucked up sandbox I'd been stuck in for six months. I'd get to see Parker again, and according to Caroline, Bones and all the squints were on their way back, too. I'd be able to get back to doing what I liked to do, chasing bad guys—the homegrown American kind, thank you very much—and solving murders with Bones and the squints. I'd get to have a real cable TV lineup (not the Armed Forces Network filtered version, which was only half a step better than what you get in hotels stateside) and be able to see my Flyers, Phillies and Steelers play each and every game. The only good thing to come out of that whole damn shithole where I'd been for six months wasn't there anymore, anyway...

_Hannah..._

I liked her. She was sexy, and smart, a bit of a freethinking, rogue rebel like me—we met when I arrested her for being in a secure area that was off-limits to non-military personnel—and we got on well. And she was hot. I wasn't exactly in love with her, but I really liked her, and the night before she'd shipped out of Qūryah on her way to her next assignment in Kirkuk, we'd agreed we both wanted to keep an open mind, let the thing between us kind of ride, and just let things take their course. Casual, you know.

So when I stepped off that military transport at Andrews Air Force Base that night, I was feeling pretty positive about things. I had it all settled in my head, all the little pieces ready to fall into place. I was gonna be with my boy again, back at my job again, working with my partner and my people again, and I had a girlfriend who was smart and sexy and sweet, even if she was in Iraq at the moment. It was going to be good. That was the mental pep talk I was giving myself as I walked down the steps towards the place on the Mall where Bones and I had agreed to meet.

I had that whole plan in my head, with all the pieces loosely fit together the way you do with a puzzle right before you lock all those pieces into place, and I felt good about it—secure, you know—until the second I stepped off the stairs, rounded the corner and saw her face:

_Bones..._

I felt my belly flip the second I saw her turn around and look at me. Her hair was a shade lighter than it'd been when I saw her last, her skin a bit darker and a little freckled from the Indonesian sun (guess she wasn't good about using the sunscreen she was always on my case about). She was obviously right off the plane, just like I was, and she looked kinda cute in a eco-warrior kind of way with that dirty white tank top (and no bra, even though I tried not to notice) and plaid button-down shirt under her dark hip-length trench coat. She looked at me with those eyes of hers—those pretty pale gray-green eyes of hers—and my belly flipped again. I couldn't help but smile. I'd missed her. My partner. My best friend. And she looked great. She jogged up to me, dropped her trusty old messenger bag and threw her arms around me.

I felt a shock run up my spine and send a raw tingle down my arms and legs as I felt her arms wrap around me and her fingers press into my shoulders. My skin got a little warm and my whole chest felt like it was going to burst. I felt my groin tighten a little as she pulled me close to her. She felt so good. So warm. So right.

_No..._

I wasn't supposed to feel this way. It wasn't supposed to feel like this. I had a girlfriend. I had Hannah.

_Hannah..._

The bartender tapped on the bar and cleared his throat to get my attention.

"Want another?" he asked me.

I felt like I'd been run over by a train that later derailed and tossed my sorry ass down a 400-foot ravine. My back hurt, my feet hurt and my head hurt, but more than anything, my heart hurt. _What the fuck was I doing? _I wondered. _What the fuck had I done? Jesus H. Christ, Seeley. _I sighed and shrugged at Louie, the bartender. _I'm such a fucking tool. Fuck my life._

I took a look at the empty pint glass in front of me, my third. I reached into the velcro'd pocket of my ACU trousers and felt the thin wad of cash folded inside. Even after losing $20 to the punk kid at pool, I thought had enough to cover another couple of beers.

"Yeah," I grunted back.

_What the fuck am I gonna do now? _I thought.

Louie brought me my beer and I stared at it for a minute. I was gonna drink that beer, call it a night, go back to the hotel—my apartment had a sublet tenant in there, so I couldn't even really go home—get a couple hours of shuteye, then shower and go have breakfast with Parker before retrieving a suit from storage and hitting the Hoover so I could interrogate Mr. and Mrs. Bartlett.

_Stick to the plan and let it ride,_ I told myself as I brought the pint glass to my lips. _It'll play out how it'll play out._

And so it did.

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**A/N: **_So, there ya go. _

_Broil wanted a fic that included the following: Booth in Army uniform, angst and gambling. Broil, my friend, I hope this is what you had in mind and that it provides you a little bit of holiday, baseball off-season, Bones hiatus cheer._

_For everyone else, let me know what you thought of that. Please, take a minute to review._

_Thanks for reading! And happy holidays._


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